Research interests
I am currently engaged in a research project to investigate the social history of mathematics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain: how was mathematics learned? Where and when was it used, and by whom? How was it portrayed in fiction and theatre?These questions open up a world of mathematical experience that is invisible to most histories of mathematics and to most historians of early modern Britain. I use both large bibliographic surveys and detailed case studies to try to answer them.
Nearly a third of printed books during the period used at least one piece of mathematical vocabulary at least once. Something like two thousand were positively 'about' mathematics. From these populations of books (or samples of them) we can learn, for instance, that immediately useful mathematics was much more prominent in print than mathematics for its own sake; that 'astrology' briefly eclipsed 'astronomy' as the term of choice for designating the 'mathematical' study of the heavens; or that the most common uses of mathematics were astrological prognostication, the making of sundials, and 'gauging' (finding the volume of liquid in a vessel).
By studying particular groups of works in detail, on the other hand, we can learn about the career trajectories of individuals, about developments in the use and teaching of mathematics, and about the details of how mathematics was represented and experienced. For example, for four months in 1674 London had a weekly newspaper, Poor Robin's Weekly Intelligencer, whose editor, an author of almanacs and joke-books, described himself as 'a well-willer to the mathematics'. In 1698 John Craig, enthused by the success of Newton's book, published the Mathematical principles of Christian theology. A recurring theme in early modern utopian fiction was the danger to a state of allowing mathematicians to wield too much power.
Although most mathematics writing was not mathematically innovative, it was rich, exciting, and inventive. During this crucial period when mathematics was becoming entrenched in science and (through the emerging study of statistics) statecraft, its popular face is both fascinating in its own right and deeply revealing of the hopes and anxieties that attended - and sometimes drove - those emerging quantitative worldviews.
I plan that this project will result in an accessible account of early modern British mathematics (working title: Number, Weight and Measure: The Mathematical Experience in Baroque England) as well as an anthology of popular mathematics writing (Numbers at Work and Play: An anthology of popular mathematics writing, 1500-2000). I expect to publish individual case studies as articles as I complete them.
